Dong Yidian: An Artist of Good Nature

Dong Yidian: an Artist of Good Nature

Gérard Xuriguera   July 26, 2014

 

Author of the article signing the manuscript

 

Nature is at the heart of Dong Yidian’s works. A solar nature strengthened by its colors, whipped by its forms, and also controlled by its architectural underpinnings; it is moving and nervous, rather brutal and manly, but never quiet or intimate. He is a powerful colorist with very fine imagination; he’s also a manufacturer determining shades of subtle counterpoints; Dong Yidian combines these antagonisms with artistic layout, delicate and invigorating, often bold but not aggressive. Everything here is held in unstable masses of layers, yet a balance weaves the fabric with a concerted strength. 

 

However, because of its omni-presence, nature plays a unifying role in the works. Given its allusive inscription on the canvas, it appears more like an excuse--- no, but rather a mounting axis around which gather and develop signs of language constituting the painter. If you look closely, his paintings do not strictly represent a place or an object, but merely mentioning it and creating an atmosphere. Viewers can feel it and how the artist restores his inner dream. 

 

In a way, his visual and mental presentation declines an organic whole relieved of any real description or particular subject, and is articulated by mixing its referents in a succession of forms and interactive staggered rhythms. Of course, the resemblance sometimes seems to dilute the condensed and diffuse layers of the material, but it never loses its nature. And if abstraction is close to figuration, the line between the two is rarely crossed, as the trace of the real permeates deep lush images. This luxuriance inherited from his native Hainan, with its tropical climate and frequent harmonious resonance of the ocean, which the artist continues to revisit. 

 

The geo-emotional elements in the artist’s living memory makes him nostalgic, with his artistic compositions steeped in sap of energy. Driven by passion, Dong Yidian magnifies in a series of spots, gushing maelstrom of shapes, and recurring petals and splashes, sometimes vaporous, sometimes compact, until achieving the unity of the canvases. 

 

Faced with this onslaught of tree-lined landscapes, floral and vegetable sprouts, bright skies and shady holes, horizons and waterfalls, maisonettes and vague silhouettes in miniature hills and valleys, it is hard not to make the connection with Western painting, in which it appears more expressive and contemporary. Moreover, according to this design language, the border between figuration and abstraction no longer exists, and the two genres complement each other. In such a context, this is the shadow of Nicolas de Staël, who reminds us of his creamy density of material, flood light, the flamboyance of trade items, which can be found in Dong Yidian’s works, and he brings them to their maximum of intensity. 

 

So on a technical level, the gesture is supporting the theme. In small or large repeated touches, it marches or retracts, multiplies or divides, while color settles to its rightful place, swirling or collecting. Coherence in the chaos ultimately governs strong and generous paintings, where wealth is in company of efficiency. 

 

Dong Yidian combines the freshness of emotion to the great fugue of life.

 

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Gérard Xuriguera: a great French writer devoted to art

Gérard Xuriguera puts his energy, his pen and his life in the service of art. He is simultaneously a critic, historian of art, writer and curator, and a friend of the greatest international contemporary artists in the 1970s. His life experience and often controversial remarks have made him an extraordinary character of the artistic sphere.